He murmured Marvell's lines to himself and, with a shake of the shoulders coming out of his brown study, swung round to the writing-table again. "Dear, I beg your pardon! . . . The truth is, I feel savage with myself: and, being a condemned non-combatant, I vented it on the most sensitive soul I could find, knowing it to be gentle, and taking care (as you say) to catch and render it helpless." He groaned. "Yes, yes--I am a brute! Even now I am using that same tone which you detest. You do right to detest it. But will it comfort you a little to know that when a man takes that tone, often enough it's because he too feels helpless as well as angry? 'Mordant' is the word, I believe: which means that the poor fool bites _you_ to get his teeth into himself." She rose from her writing-chair and touched him by the arm. "Robert!" she appealed. "Oh, yes--'What is the matter with me?' . . . Nothing--or, in other words, Everything--that is to say, this War." "It's terrible, of course; but I don't see--" She broke off. "Is it the War itself that upsets you, or the little we can do to help? If _that's_ your trouble, why, of course it was silly of me to worry you just now about my being nervous of facing these people. But we're only at the beginning--" "Agatha!" The Vicar drew a hand from his pocket, laid it on his wife's shoulder, and looked her in the eyes. "Don't I know that, if the call came, you would face a platoon? It's I who am weak. This War--" He stared out of the window again. "It is a just War, if ever there was one. . . . Robert, you don't doubt _that_, surely! Forced on us--Why, you yourself used to warn me, when I little heeded, that the Germans were preparing it, that 'the Day' must come sooner or later: for they would have it so." "That's true enough." "So positive about it as you were then, proving to me that their Naval Estimates could spell nothing else! . . . And now that it has come, what is the matter with _us?_ Have _we_ provoked it? Have _we_ torn up treaties? Had you, a week ago--had any one we know-the smallest desire for it?" "Before God, we had not. The English people--I will swear to it, in this corner of the land--had no more quarrel with the Germans than I have with you at this moment. Why, we saw how the first draft--the Naval Reservists--went off last Sunday. In a kind of stupor, they were. But wars are made by Governments, Agatha; never by peoples." "And our Government--much as I detest them for their behaviour to the Welsh Church--our Government worked for peace up to the last." "I honestly believe they did. I am sure they did . . . up to the last, as you say. The question is, _Were they glad or sorry when they didn't bring it off?_" "Robert!"